For sure #1 is a big problem. But are OKRs causing this, or are the big companies that are using OKRs just fundamentally slow and inflexible? (In other words, a

For sure #1 is a big problem. But are OKRs causing this, or are the big companies that are using OKRs just fundamentally slow and inflexible? (In other words, are OKRs a symptom rather than a cause?) Thinking about how to coordinate 100k engineers, the trade-offs are pretty brutal. Startup-style “move fast, break stuff” simply doesn’t scale well. I’d like to see some case studies here. Anyone got examples they like? I hear patio11 talking about Stripe a lot, and he says stuff like “could we deliver something faster?” which I think gets at an urgency for results, interested how they coordinate the layers and orgs. I think it’s plausible that OKRs forestall agility and innovation as-used. But (at risk of invoking the “no true Scotsman” argument), maybe these companies are just doing OKRs wrong? OKRs are supposed to be abstract enough that you can change your plan if something better comes along. So if your KR is tightly coupled to a particular implementation then you can’t pivot in the face of new information. A quarter is a long planning horizon for small/medium sized companies! But if your KR is loosely-coupled, then it leaves room for new approaches. This balance is hard! The maximally-loose O/KR for many companies is just “succeed/increase share price by X% QoQ”. This doesn’t give you any direction. I think at their best OKRs provide bi-directional information flow; both giving a way to make output from the lower levels more legible to the upper levels, while also making the objectives, desires, priorities of the upper levels more legible to the lower levels. I think any replacement has to achieve both of these things too.